• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?

        Technical SEO
        5
        10
        2086
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • MadeLoud
          MadeLoud last edited by

          We have thousands of pages we're trying to have de-indexed in Google for months now.  They've all got . But they simply will not go away in the SERPs.

          Here is just one example....

          http://bitly.com/VutCFiIf you search this URL in Google, you will see that it is indexed, yet it's had  for many months.  This is just one example for thousands of pages, that will not get de-indexed.  Am I missing something here?  Does it have to do with using content="none" instead of content="noindex, follow"?

          Any help is very much appreciated.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • SanketPatel
            SanketPatel @MadeLoud last edited by

            Thanks for your reply,

            Let me know if you are able to deindex those pages. I will wait. Also please share what you have implemented to deindex those pages.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • MadeLoud
              MadeLoud @SanketPatel last edited by

              A page can have a link to it, and still not be indexed, so I disagree with you on that.

              But thanks for using the domain name.  That will teach me to use a URL shortener...

              SanketPatel 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • MadeLoud
                MadeLoud @MadeLoud last edited by

                Hm, that is interesting.  So you're saying that it will get crawled, and thus will eventually become deindexed (as noindex is part of the content="none" directive), but since it's a dead end page, it just takes an extra long time for that particular page to get crawled?

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • edwardrj
                  edwardrj last edited by

                  Just to add to the other answers, you can also remove the URLs (or entire directory if necessary) via the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools, although Google prefers you to use it for emergencies of sorts (I've had no problems with it).

                  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                  • eyepaq
                    eyepaq @MadeLoud last edited by

                    No, nofollow will only tell the bot that the page is a dead end - that the bot should not follow any links on page. And that means any inks from those pages won't be visited by the bot - that is slowing the crawling process overall for those pages.

                    If you block a page in robots.txt and the page is already in the index - that will remain in the index as the noindex or content=none won't be seen by the bot so it won't be removed from the index - it will just won't be visited anymore.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • MadeLoud
                      MadeLoud @eyepaq last edited by

                      Ok, so, nofollow is stopping the page from being read at all?  I thought that nofollow just means the links on the page will not be followed.  Is meta nofollow essentially the same as blocking a page in robots.txt?

                      eyepaq MadeLoud 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • SanketPatel
                        SanketPatel last edited by

                        Hi Howard,

                        The page is in Google index because you are still linking to that page from your website. Here is the page from where that page links:

                        http://www.2mcctv.com/product_print-productinfoVeiluxVS70CDNRDhtml.html

                        As you are linking that page Google indexing the page. Google come to know about "noindex" tag before that he has already indexed it. Sorry for bad English.

                        Lindsay has written awesome post about it here:

                        http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts

                        After reading above blog post, my all doubts about noindex, follow, robots.txt get clear.

                        Thanks Lindsay

                        MadeLoud 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                        • Bryan_Loconto
                          Bryan_Loconto last edited by

                          We always use the noindex code in our robot.txt file.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • eyepaq
                            eyepaq last edited by

                            Hi,

                            In order to deindex you should use noindex as content=none also means nofollow. You do need to follow now in order to reach all other pages and see the no index tag and remove those from the index.

                            When you have all of them out of the index you can set the none back on.

                            This is the main reason "none" as attribute is not very wide in usage as "shooting yourself in the foot" with it it's easy.

                            On the otehr hand you need to see if google bot is actually reaching those pages:

                            • see if you don't have any robots.txt restrictions first

                            • see when google's bot last have a hit on any of the pages - that will give you a good idea and you can do a prediction.

                            If those pages are in the sup index you can wait for some time for Google bit to revisit.

                            One last note: build xml sitemaps with all of those pages and submit those via WMT - that will help at 100% to get those in front of the firing squad and also to be able to monitor those better.

                            Hope it helps.

                            MadeLoud 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                            • 1 / 1
                            • First post
                              Last post

                            Browse Questions

                            Explore more categories

                            • Moz Tools

                              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                            • SEO Tactics

                              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                            • Community

                              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                            • Digital Marketing

                              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                            • Research & Trends

                              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                            • Support

                              Connect on product support and feature requests.

                            • See all categories

                            Related Questions

                            • teamodea

                              Safety Data Sheet PDFs are Showing Higher in Search Results than Product Pages

                              pdf searchresultshelp

                              I have a client who just launched an updated website that has WooCommerce added to it. The website also has a page of Safety Data Sheets that are PDFs that contain information about some of the products. When we do a Google search for many of the products the Safety Data Sheets show up first in the search results instead of the product pages. Has anyone had this happen and know how to solve the issue?

                              Technical SEO | | teamodea
                              0
                            • Chophel

                              My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.

                              Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages.  I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
                              {YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
                              {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
                              {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
                              {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
                              {YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
                              {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
                              {YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
                              {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
                              {HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
                              {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php

                              Technical SEO | | Chophel
                              0
                            • smmour

                              SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages

                              Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!

                              Technical SEO | | smmour
                              2
                            • promodirect

                              How to show number of products in your Google SERP?

                              I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM

                              Technical SEO | | promodirect
                              0
                            • CWseo

                              Why am I not showing up in the SERP's or Google Local?

                              I have been trying to optimise the following site for both Google SERP's and Google Local - Pixel Primate The URL has been around for around 3 years now but they just updated the website and launched it in December 2012. I did the on-page optimisation early in January 2013 and Google seems to have indexed the changes, for the home page at least. One major keyword I am targeting for the home page is 'Web Design Leicester'. I understand that the DA is fairly low (24) so this is something I need to improve. However, I've experienced positive results fairly quickly from just on-page optimisation for other sites I have worked on. The site just doesn't seem to be ranking at all for any keywords. Maybe the industry type is just extremely competitve but I find it very strange to not be visible anywhere in the SERPs. The site does not seem to have any penalties as it ranks for 'Pixel Primate' and all pages appear when doing a site: search. Also what's strange is that I set up the Google Local listing years ago but it doesn't appear anywhere in the local listing, not even when I search for it manually. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

                              Technical SEO | | CWseo
                              0
                            • solution.advisor

                              Keyword not showing

                              Hi, we are trying to rank this keyword "Human Resource Books" for Silvercreek.ca for a long time. But somehow, the keyword is not ranked by google at all. Is there  a reason why Google is denying our site? What did we do wrong? Can anyone help to see what wrong with tis siet www.silvercreekpress.ca? thanks

                              Technical SEO | | solution.advisor
                              0
                            • Techboy

                              Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?

                              I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.

                              Technical SEO | | Techboy
                              0
                            • Function5

                              Why are apostrophes and other characters still showing as code in my titles?

                              Hi, I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally. Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ. Example: Normal visitor sees: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts Google and SEOMOZ see: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work. Any help or explanation would be appreciated.

                              Technical SEO | | Function5
                              0

                            Get started with Moz Pro!

                            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                            Start my free trial
                            Products
                            • Moz Pro
                            • Moz Local
                            • Moz API
                            • Moz Data
                            • STAT
                            • Product Updates
                            Moz Solutions
                            • SMB Solutions
                            • Agency Solutions
                            • Enterprise Solutions
                            • Digital Marketers
                            Free SEO Tools
                            • Domain Authority Checker
                            • Link Explorer
                            • Keyword Explorer
                            • Competitive Research
                            • Brand Authority Checker
                            • Local Citation Checker
                            • MozBar Extension
                            • MozCast
                            Resources
                            • Blog
                            • SEO Learning Center
                            • Help Hub
                            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                            • How-to Guides
                            • Moz Academy
                            • API Docs
                            About Moz
                            • About
                            • Team
                            • Careers
                            • Contact
                            Why Moz
                            • Case Studies
                            • Testimonials
                            Get Involved
                            • Become an Affiliate
                            • MozCon
                            • Webinars
                            • Practical Marketer Series
                            • MozPod
                            Connect with us

                            Contact the Help team

                            Join our newsletter
                            Moz logo
                            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                            • Accessibility
                            • Terms of Use
                            • Privacy

                            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.